Nasa wants you to design a smartwatch app for astronauts

Nasa hires the brightest minds in the world to help it explore our Universe. But today it is casting its net wider in the hope of finding a designer for a smartwatch app that will be used by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The US space agency might receives $18 billion a year in funding from the US Federal Government, but it's putting up $1,500 on Freelancer.com for anyone that can come up with a superior app interface design that would fit something like the Samsung Gear 2 hardware. With 16 million people using Freelancer.com, we're betting one or two will rise to the challenge. "We are interested in the emerging world of smartwatch technology and are looking to leverage this technology to create a smartwatch app that could be helpful to astronauts," the agency's Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) writes on Freelancer.com. "The challenge is to design the general user interface for smart watch applications for use on the International Space Station."

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Anyone can pitch over the next four weeks, keeping to a brief that's, well, rather brief.

Nasa stipulates that it wants pictures that demonstrate "navigation, interaction, layout, look, feel, etc". It goes on to describe the kinds of daily activites the app would be used for. There's a Crew Timeline element that is essentially an ISS calendar -- today this is viewed using a laptop or iPad, Nasa explains. Nasa also wants a Caution & Warnings element to the app that will use different colours to alert astronauts to different problems on the space station. There could also be an alert that shows what times of the day the astronaut can communicate with Earth on voice or video, and a Timers Application -- basically an alarm, probably linking to the agenda timeline.

Nasa wants all this information in one place, on an astronaut's wrist, with a prime goal of increasing "efficiency" by ensuring the astronaut has to act or provide feedback whenever anything vital occurs.

To help guide designers, Nasa attached some low resolution images of the kinds of displays astronauts aboard the ISS are working with today. And they're pretty terrible. The agenda looks like a clogged up, incomprehensible spreadsheet, and the rest of the designs look to be a tribute to the early days of the internet. Nasa needs help, it is clear.

This is not the first time Nasa has turned to the Freelancer.com community; it used the same Freelancer Contests crowdsourcing platform to find designs for tools usable by Robonaut 2. At the time, Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie said the move "clearly shows that crowdsourcing solutions has become an essential part of creativity and innovation and that there is a strong demand to develop ingenious and world-leading solutions online".